5 PHOTO APPLICATIONS TO MAKE BLOGGING EASIER

Since I've been blogging for around the last 6 months, I rely on a few applications to make my life that bit easier (blog life that is not real life!) Anything that keeps my photos organised and looking great is a must for me, so I'm sharing my top 5 with you!

STORAGE

If you're limited on storage space on your computer or if like me don't like faffing around with external hard drives & USB sticks then download Dropbox. You can access it off or online from your computer as well as on your smart phone, allowing you to  access your files securely from different locations. I save all my edited photos on there and you can download them full res where ever you are. You can also create folders to keep everything organised. Plus it's free - sorted.

CURVE TOOL

I rarely get good natural light at home so it's a real struggle to get well lit photos. If my photos need a boost I use the Curve tool in Photoshop. I am rubbish with Photoshop but this tool is relatively straight forward to use and makes such a difference. It allows you to adjust the colour and tone of the image, as well as add light and contrast. Once you've uploaded your image, select layers from the menu, click on create adjustment layer and select curves. A little grid pops up and by adding points on the grid, drag the line to adjust the image to your preference, but keep it balanced otherwise you'll loose the colours and it'll look washed out. I know this may sound a bit confusing but there are lots of great in depth tutorials online to use as a step by step guide.

FILTERS & EDITING

A recent discovery is the Fotor app which is available to download from the iTunes app store as well as on Android and iPhone devices. If you want something a bit fancier than iPhoto then you're spoilt for choice here. There's also a tilt shift setting, which is super easy to use to add depth of field at a click of a button - you can see it applied on the top photo of this post. There's also a whole range of standard editing functions such as exposure, contrast and crop. I like using the filters, which you can see in action below - the unedited image is in the middle and the edited image below.

IMAGE HOSTING

Chances are you're taking photos with a pretty good camera and I've noticed when you upload photos using Blogger, they are compressed. This may not bother many of you but sometimes it sucks the life of my photos, so as a solution I upload my photos to Flickr, which stores them uncompressed. You get an amazing 1 terabyte storage, which is more than enough space. Uploading images via Flickr onto Blogger is quite fiddly but if you're familiar with HTML coding then hopefully it shouldn't be too confusing. Once your image is uploaded onto Flickr, click on the share arrow and copy the HTML code:

Back into Blogger, click on the HTML button, which is next to the Compose button in the top left hand corner. Paste in the HTML code and your image should pop up uncompressed, you can also adjust the width and height as well to your liking.

Pros - you get beautiful full res photos, cons - it's a b*tch (excuse my french!) to load up the images on a web browser and photos don't always load up quick enough on bloglovin. So I only use this if my photo look terrible compressed otherwise I can live with most of them.

WATERMARK

Another free and user friendly website is Picmonkey, which is great for creating blog banners and headers. I use it primarily to watermark my photos. It's super easy to use with a wide variety of fonts, which you can change the size and opacity of the text.

What photo applications do you use?

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